Peeping Tom

Watch Peeping Tom (1960) online on iFILM — Michael Powell's British psychological thriller that single-handedly ended its director's career upon release. The press called for a ban. Critics wrote that it should be destroyed. Decades later it sits alongside Psycho as one of cinema's defining portraits of a killer.

Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm) spends his days as a focus puller at a London film studio. Quiet, polite, barely there. Nights are different: he films women dying, a camera blade fixed to his tripod. The obsession traces back to childhood — his psychologist father recorded every fear response young Mark ever had. Now the grown-up son keeps the footage going. A neighbour named Helen slowly gets close, and he isn't sure what to do with that.

Cinematographer Otto Heller built the film so the audience watches through Mark's own lens — a structural choice that makes the discomfort personal rather than distant. Powell's film predates the slasher genre by two decades and invented the killer-POV grammar that Halloween and dozens of others later borrowed. Stream Peeping Tom (1960) on iFILM.